What are "Nihilistic Violent Extremists"?
Meet the new internal enemy
The arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home has unified the national security state around a broader threat it sees in the American people.
Inside the government, sources tell us, officials are scrambling to define the moment. They’re exploring if there’s any connection between the attempts on Donald Trump’s life; Luigi Mangione and his sympathizers; Tesla vandalism; and even earlier attacks, like the one on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
The Trump Justice Department and the domestic terrorism fighters think they have an answer: Nihilistic Violent Extremists.
They’ve already got an acronym — NVEs.
The brand new term was invented to replace the Biden administration’s focus on anti-government and “anti-authority” extremism adopted after January 6. It also has the side benefit of appearing to be non-partisan, shifting the attention away from MAGA and white supremacism while pretending not to be focusing on anti-Trump activism.
But here’s the beauty for any government bureaucrat or lawyer: Everyone and anyone can be NVEs, like pedophiles, according to court documents filed this month and reported here for the first time.
Nihilism, philosophy 101 graduates will recognize, was most famously explored by Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher who wrote about declining belief in the meaning of life, morality and society.
Nihilist Violent Extremist has to be the most ridiculous term since the FBI warned of the looming threat of “involuntary celibate (Incel) violent extremists (IVEs)” in a joint intelligence bulletin in 2020. Was Joker-fied Violent Extremists already taken? Or was a Batman reference too lowbrow for whatever dork government bureaucrat came up with this?
In a country where mass shooters routinely target complete strangers, including schoolchildren, it’s hard to see how targeting a top elected official represents a rejection of meaning. The real purpose of the clunky term is to replace “terrorism,” a loaded word that also has limitations in the law.
The term NVE also has the beauty of being elastic enough to apply to individuals and groups who are the focus of the administration’s war on all kinds of Americans. Nihilism also avoids all of the rusty and problematic words of the past: subversive, dissident, insurrectionist, revolutionary, or even “anti-government” (the Biden term).
“Violent extremism” has the benefit of having already been in government usage. Thus the news media reporting on these very court cases completely missed the NVE label, perhaps because it sounds vaguely official. (As an aside, the common usage of extremism domestically emerged during the Obama administration and was meant to be non-partisan and race and religion neutral in order to avoid using the term Islam.)
So now we have yet another term, one that’s even broader, applying to anyone who would like to undermine the ruling order.
Nihilist Violent Extremist first appeared in two court filings earlier this month warning of “the overarching threat of NVE.” One is an FBI affidavit alleging Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old high schooler in Wisconsin, murdered his parents as part of a plan to assassinate President Trump and foment a civil war. The second document, a criminal complaint accusing California man Jose Henry Ayala Casimiro of coercing children into producing child sexual abuse material as part a plan to bring about the downfall of the world order.
Both documents define the term as criminality intended to bring about societal breakdown. Per the filings:
“Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs) are individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability. NVEs work individually or as part of a network with these goals of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.”
While the crimes alleged would certainly justify throwing these guys in a dungeon forever, the idea that they threaten to usher in societal collapse is laughable.
Casamiro is accused by the FBI of having worked with a transnational sextortion network called “764” to target children for sexual abuse. The details alleged are stomach turning, from having underage girls engage in self mutilation to directing them to engage in sexual acts on camera. But the complaint says these acts were intended “to further the network’s goals of accelerating social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the United States Government,” which sounds to me like some demented philosophical justification for just being a pedo. In fact, the 62-page complaint doesn’t seem to provide any evidence of Casamiro’s belief in this goal specifically, instead just repeating that this was 764’s purpose.
As for Casap, the warrant does at least describe a three-page manifesto being found on his phone espousing a desire to kill President Trump to precipitate societal collapse. But planning is barely described in the manifesto, nor elsewhere, save for some discussion about his allegedly having paid for a drone and explosives for it to drop. The warrant also alleges Casap was in touch with the Order of Nine Angles, a Satanic neo-Nazi group that espouses accelerationism, a fancy word for the belief that destabilizing the social order allows for radical change. That is pretty heady stuff to ascribe to a 17 year old, and ends up having the feel of an episode of Altered Carbon.
President Trump, his Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have been on threatmongering spree, applying the terrorism label to various Tesla vandalism cases in recent months. The Trump administration, led by counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, is also preparing a new sweeping counterterrorism strategy premised on the belief that violent opposition to Trump is being orchestrated by shadowy forces, as I reported last week.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk even went so far as suggesting these vandals are mere “foot soldiers” being directed by unseen “generals” that need to be rooted out. Here’s how Musk put it:
“What we actually have to get to is the people who are organizing and paying for these attacks and protests. The people who are actually throwing the molotov cocktails, they are the foot soldiers. We need to go after the generals.”
Even assuming that any of these crimes are some kind of serious threat to the government or to the established social order, the Justice Department already has a violent extremist category for them: “Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism,” or “AGAAVE” for short. This was the designation that the Biden administration invented to apply to pro-Trump (or seemingly pro-Trump) violence, including January 6 rioters, as my editor has reported.
But now that it’s a Republican in the White House, rabbit season has turned to duck season, so the terrorist du jour are now Trump’s opponents. And, most conveniently for the national security state, anyone who threatens the government itself.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
These guys need to watch The Big Lebowski.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNChSF5nqJs
Are they Nazis?
No Donnie, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.
“Say what you want about the tenants of national socialism, at least it’s an ethos.” - our national security apparatus, currently.